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</head><body text="#000000">Thanks Andy, <br>
<br>
I used to do a lot of validation on HOT projects. However to make it
work you needed to contact the mapper in a very short time frame.<br>
<br>
These days I have my own set of tools which I use to clean up the map
especially in Africa. I can clean up the errors in an area that covers
the HOT project much faster than going through the HOT validation
process.<br>
<br>
I must confess if I see a dozen highways with name=road on them I have
been known to remove the name=road tag.<br>
<br>
I have left a comment on the HOT project.<br>
<br>
I have got feedback from the mapper who changed at least one
highway=unclassified, their comment was <br>
<br>
"OK ... The highway specifications for this missing map project are
simple for mapping : tracks ou residential ... but further a global
validation will be led with more details for major roads connecting
settlements"<br>
<br>
This mapper happens to be the person who has validated most on the
project. The instructions are in many ways fine if it applied to new
highway that were mapped as part of the project. You could simply do a
clean up afterwards but what seems to have happened is a large section
of the map has had many highway=unclassified etc. highways reclassified
to track and that is a bigger problem. Often snapshots are taken of the
map and downloaded to OSMand etc. So even if it was wrong for a week
before being corrected the effects could linger through other systems.<br>
<br>
Not exactly reassuring that they won't continue to change tags.<br>
<br>
The clean up isn't the concern. I can whip through the area with JOSM
and slowly correct them as I have done with most of Niger. HOT projects
themselves typically cover a fairly small area. Reverting might throw
the baby out with the bathwater and there is little enough mapping in
Niger as it is.<br>
<br>
The concern is two fold, first one mapper who was working with me and
mapping settlements and connecting highways got disheartened by the
sheer number of incorrectly tagged highways and second and more
important is prevention is cheaper than clean up.<br>
<br>
These days to get to the instructions on a HOT project you need to say
you want to map etc. There is a certain amount of "<span
style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">phone menu
purgatory" in extracting them.<br>
<br>
I think most HOT projects refer to the African Highway wiki as I would
expect. This one seems recent and the concern is the instructions will
be copied.<br>
<br>
Cheerio John<br>
</span></span><br>
<span>Andy Townsend wrote on 5/9/2021 5:10 PM:</span><br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:fae544d3-31e4-de4d-b78c-8e4385f558c7@gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 09/05/2021 18:08, John Whelan via
talk wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:654519b7-d6b7-3f61-90f2-c1d46ba3614a@gmail.com"><meta
http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
On project 10645 the instructions are: <br>
<br></blockquote>
<p>First things first - Have you tried contacting the organiser of
that project?</p>
<p>You might say "but it won't do any good". However one thing that
is certain is that if you don't try and contact the organiser,
they won't know that there is a problem.<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:654519b7-d6b7-3f61-90f2-c1d46ba3614a@gmail.com"><br>
<p>The concerns are first older mapping which has followed the <a
href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_Tag_Africa"
moz-do-not-send="true">Highway Tag Africa - OpenStreetMap Wiki</a>
have been retagged incorrectly.</p></blockquote>
<p>There are a few things that you can do to investigate this. You
can try overpass queries with a date in an area to see if
"highway=track" goes up and other highway tags go down.</p>
<p>Once you've identified a project giving poor advice, you can see
who's contributed to it, download changeset XML and see how many
"highway=track" there are in there.</p>
<p>I can see that you've commented at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10645" moz-do-not-send="true">https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/10645</a>
. I'd also suggest
sending the organiser an OSM message (or commenting on a
changeset) so that they definitely get a notification about your
comment. If they ignore you, let the DWG know by email so that we
can let them know that someone's trying to get in touch.<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:654519b7-d6b7-3f61-90f2-c1d46ba3614a@gmail.com"><p>Second how
many other HOT projects have the same instructions?<br>
</p></blockquote>
I've no idea; have you tried asking HOT if project text is
searchable? This text doesn't seem to be trivially externally
searchable, though a quick sample does find more references to
"please refer to Highway Tag Africa" than the text that you
mentioned.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:654519b7-d6b7-3f61-90f2-c1d46ba3614a@gmail.com"><p> </p>
<br>
<p>Third how should it be cleaned up?<br>
</p></blockquote>
<p>What would really help would be if you could do a bit of
investigation of the scope of the problem, in terms of:</p>
<p>* Project creators that don't know that they should be saying
"follow Highway Tag Africa"</p>
<p>* Projects with incorrect text in the instructions</p>
<p>* Incorrect data in OSM</p>
<p>Once the size of the problem has been identified it'll be a lot
easier to decide the best way to fix it. If it's just a few roads
here and there, then a manual process following a todolist in JOSM
or elsewhere will likely work fine. If it's "everything by mapper
X needs reverting" then there are tools to do that.</p>
<p>It may be that you don't currently know where to start with some
of these "find out the scale of the problem" ideas. If that's the
case, please ask - perhaps on the help site. Following a request
from HOT, with a DWG hat on I've been going through a process of
tidying up some overenthusiastic but undertrained corporate
mappers over the last month or so. None of the things that I've
been doing for that needed access more than the same OSM API that
everyone gets to use, though some of the tools may be unfamiliar.<br>
</p>
<p>It may well be that you'd like someone to help with data
correction or reverts. Someone from HOT may be able to help with
that; the DWG also could. However a request of the form "mappers
A, B and C on projects X, Y and Z have incorrectly converted
$number of non-track roads to highway-track in $country" is much
more likely to be dealt with quickly than "some mappers in Africa
might be using the wrong tags".<br>
</p>
<p>Best Regards,</p>
<p>Andy (from the DWG)</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:654519b7-d6b7-3f61-90f2-c1d46ba3614a@gmail.com"></blockquote>
<br>
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